The blog of www.erikgoddard.com, featuring news, updates and information for the miniature architectural work of Erik Goddard.

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Saturday, January 14, 2017

Lumière: a 1:12 scale modern house Part 7

The next three phases involved installing all the windows, putting on the ceiling/roof, and starting the exterior.

The windows installation is time-consuming because it means gluing back pieces to support one side of the plexi, installing the plexi, and gluing front pieces to hold it in place like a sandwich. There are I think 25 separte windows on this structure, and some of the trapezoid pieces had to be cut multiple times to get them right. Tolerance was limited to about 2mm.

Even though my reason for using Plexi in this case was because of fragility during shipping, it has its pros and cons. I had Kreative Acrylics cut the pieces to my measurements. It looks gleaming and gorgeous when you first peel the paper off, but it scratches if you look at it the wrong way. It attracts dust easily. You have to peel the paper backing off, which can be hard to do without scratching the piece as you hold it.

The ceiling and roof are a layer of mahagony strips. While out of scale at 3 inch wide strips, it is a sleight of hand because the eye hardly ever looks at a ceiling, real life or scale. On the bottom side of the strips went the LED strip for ambient lighting. On top of them went strips of dark card stock for a strip roof look.

In the above, you can see the roof, and also the painted strips on the exterior. That is to cover the gaps between the rusty panels:

These are intended to simulate rusted steel for part of the exterior. I cut about 30 pieces of basswood wide strips, then sprayed the in multiple layers:

black primer/solid

suede textured (or granite on some, in random layers)

gray/random

terra cotta/dark brown/random

highlights of all colors here and there

When dry and applied, they form the exterior on the back and left side of the structure:

The right side and lower front exterior is made of wood strips. The way I ensure a clean line between the end of each strip and the buttressing strip they meet, is to cut them all at once, instead of individually.

Next up: working on the narrow Japanese garden in front of the lower floor (left side):

For now, though, a couple of staging shots since the structure is largely intact: